Of these three, only two publish a price, and they publish very different kinds of price. Microsoft lists Viva Glint at $2.00 per user per month paid yearly. Gallup lists a one-time Q12 survey on its own store at $20.00 per participant with a four-participant minimum. Culture Amp publishes nothing and routes every pricing question to a quote. That asymmetry is the most useful fact in this comparison, because it tells you which budgets you can build today and which one you cannot build until a salesperson calls you back.
All three sell an employee engagement survey. They are not, however, the same purchase. One is an add-on to a Microsoft agreement, one is an instrument with ninety years of research behind the brand, and one is a modular people platform that happens to have started with surveys. The figures below were read off each vendor's own pages in August 2026, and where a number is ours rather than theirs, it says so.
How much does each one cost?
| Vendor | What the vendor publishes (checked August 2026) | Commercial model | What you can budget without a call |
|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Viva Glint | $2.00 per user per month, paid yearly, as a standalone add-on. Also $6.00 inside Workplace Analytics and Employee Feedback, and $12.00 in the full Viva Suite | Per licensed user, annual commitment | Everything. This is the only full enterprise listening rate card in the category |
| Gallup Q12 | $20.00 per participant on the Gallup store, SKU 13870, one time, minimum four participants | Per participant purchased, one-time | Only the small self-serve product. Gallup Access, where real programs run, publishes nothing |
| Culture Amp | No figure anywhere. The pricing page segments buyers into under 200, 200 to 999, and 1,000-plus employees and offers a quote | Per employee per year, by module, quoted | Nothing. Every route ends at a demo request |
Third-party procurement databases do circulate per-employee estimates for Culture Amp. We are not going to reprint them as if they were prices, because they are reconstructions of other companies' negotiated contracts and they age badly. If a figure did not come off the vendor's own page, treat it as a rumor with a decimal point.
Why only one of the three publishes a price
Microsoft prices Viva Glint the way it prices everything else, as a line on a public rate card, because it sells to tenants who are already buying seats and it wants the add-on to be a small, obvious yes. That is a packaging decision, not generosity, and it has a consequence worth knowing: because Glint meters on licensed users rather than on responses, you pay for every employee whether or not they answer.
Gallup publishes a price only for the smallest version of its product. The $20.00 store survey is a genuine, buyable thing, and for a forty-person company that wants one clean read it is a reasonable purchase. But the store product is a one-off. It gives you a participation dashboard, a heatmap you can cut by reporting groups and export to Excel, a one-page PDF and a manager conversation guide, and then it ends. Gallup's own note on the store says you cannot add participants after purchase, so the invitation list is itself a buying decision. Everything most buyers actually want from Gallup, the benchmark comparisons, Q12+ with its four extra items, the wider library of validated questions and guided action planning, sits inside Gallup Access, which is quoted. Our Gallup Q12 pricing page works through both routes and the arithmetic at real headcounts.
Culture Amp publishes nothing because it sells a modular platform and the module mix changes the number more than headcount does. Engage, Perform and its People Science consulting are separately priced, so a single per-employee figure would be misleading even if the company wanted to give one. That is a defensible position. It is still an obstacle for anyone who has to get a budget approved before they are allowed to talk to vendors, which is most people.
What each one is actually for
| Vendor | Core job | Benchmarks | Best fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Viva Glint | Continuous listening inside a Microsoft estate: engagement and lifecycle surveys, dashboards, comment analytics, predictive analytics | Internal and external benchmarks per Microsoft's documentation | Enterprises already committed to Microsoft that want listening in the same place as everything else |
| Gallup Q12 | A validated twelve-element engagement measure with unusually deep research behind it | The main reason to buy Gallup, and the part that requires Gallup Access | Organizations where the credibility of the instrument itself matters to leadership |
| Culture Amp | A people platform: engagement surveys plus performance, development and analytics in one system | Included, and a long-standing selling point | HR teams that want survey, performance and development on one contract |
The mistake worth avoiding is comparing them on feature lists. All three will field a survey, produce a dashboard and segment the results. What differs is what surrounds the survey, and that is where the money goes.
Benchmarks are the thing you are really paying for
A raw engagement score is close to meaningless on its own. Seventy-two percent favorable is neither good nor bad until you know what comparable organizations score, and that comparison set is the asset none of the three will let you have cheaply. It is also the reason Gallup's $20.00 store product is not the bargain it looks like: Gallup states it has studied over 3.3 million workers across more than 100,000 teams, and that database is the point of buying Gallup, but the self-serve survey is not the route to it.
When you compare benchmark claims, ask three questions of each vendor and write the answers down. Which industries and company sizes is the comparison set built from? How recently was it refreshed? And how many organizations sit in the specific cut you would actually be measured against? A global all-industry benchmark is easy to provide and hard to act on. A US healthcare benchmark of forty comparable systems is far more useful and far rarer, which is why vendors are vague about the second and third questions unless you insist.
Which is cheaper, Culture Amp or Viva Glint?
On published figures Viva Glint is cheaper, but that comparison is uneven because Culture Amp publishes nothing to compare against. What can be said honestly is that $2.00 per user per month puts Viva Glint at the low end of the mid-market, and that vendors who do publish rate cards in this space list engagement modules around $4.00 per user per month. If price alone decides it and you are already a Microsoft tenant, Glint is very hard to beat. If you would be buying Microsoft licensing you do not otherwise need, that arithmetic reverses quickly.
Is Viva Glint included in Microsoft 365 E5?
No, and this is the single most common budgeting error of the three. Microsoft's own service description marks every Viva Glint feature as available only as a standalone SKU or as part of the Viva Suite, which means no Microsoft 365 or Office 365 plan includes it at any level, E5 included. An organization on E5 still pays the Glint line on top. Check what your tenant actually holds before the business case is written, not after. The Viva Glint pricing page has the full rate card and the prerequisites.
How much does a Gallup Q12 survey cost?
The store product is $20.00 per participant as a one-time purchase, minimum four participants. One hundred invitations is $2,000 and three hundred is $6,000, which is our arithmetic on Gallup's published per-participant figure rather than a quote from Gallup. Note that you are paying for invitations, not responses: at a sixty percent response rate, three hundred purchased participants yield around one hundred and eighty usable responses, so the real cost of a data point is nearer $33. A figure of $15 per employee still circulates widely and refers to a retired self-serve tier whose domain now redirects to Gallup Access.
How to choose between them
Start with the constraint rather than the feature list.
If you are a Microsoft shop and the requirement is continuous listening, price Viva Glint first. It is the only one of the three you can budget accurately today, it lands where your people already work, and the add-on rate is low enough that the decision usually turns on whether you want the Viva Suite rather than on whether Glint is worth $2.00.
If leadership needs to trust the instrument, Gallup earns its price. There are situations where an executive team will argue with an internal survey and will not argue with the Q12, and that credibility is a real part of what you are buying. Budget for Gallup Access rather than the store product if you need benchmarks and action planning, and get the quote early because you cannot model it yourself.
If you want surveys, performance and development on one contract, Culture Amp is the natural shortlist entry, and the module question matters more than the headcount question. Ask for the quote broken out by module and for a year-two figure in writing, because renewal is where modular platforms get expensive.
One thing all three share is worth planning for before you sign anything. Every one of them will hand managers an action plan, and the most common reason those plans go nowhere is that the lowest-scoring item names a capability the manager was never given. Gallup's growth element is the clearest example: when people say they have had no opportunity to learn and grow this year, no amount of further surveying moves it, and the fix is an actual route to train and certify people across the team rather than another conversation guide. Decide who owns that before the results arrive, not after.
Where this platform fits, and where it does not
We sell assessment software, so read this section with that in mind. Assessmentcloud is not a replacement for any of the three above and is not a licensed Q12. It answers a different question. Where those platforms measure engagement deeply and repeatedly, this one scores five organizational dimensions at once, culture and engagement, process maturity, digital maturity, skills gaps and compliance readiness, into a single 0 to 100 report against an industry median, priced for the whole company rather than per seat or per participant.
That is a breadth instrument rather than a depth one. If you already know engagement is the problem and you need to track it every quarter with credible benchmarks, buy one of the three above. If you are not yet sure whether the constraint is culture, process, technology, skills or compliance, a breadth read tells you where to point a listening program before you commit to a multi-year contract on one dimension.
For the wider set, the employee listening platforms enterprise HR teams shortlist covers scope and published pricing across the category, employee engagement software cost works through what drives the number, and employee engagement survey pricing runs the arithmetic at 100, 300 and 1,000 employees. If one of these three is already on your shortlist and you want the honest case against it, see Gallup Q12 alternatives, Culture Amp alternatives and Viva Glint alternatives.
Pricing and packaging in this category change without notice, and two of these three vendors do not publish at all. Confirm current terms directly with each vendor before any of these figures, including ours, goes into a budget.
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